


In Keen and Quivering Ratio

by jouissant



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Cruising, Glory Hole, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:03:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21721414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Down by the dockyards there is a certain public privy well known to sailors and ne’er-do-wells.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 44
Kudos: 149
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	In Keen and Quivering Ratio

**Author's Note:**

> For Terror Bingo 2019- "Glory hole"
> 
> Thanks to what-alchemy for the beta and combing the 19th century canon for poetry about blow jobs.

Down by the dockyards there is a certain public privy well known to sailors and ne’er-do-wells. Francis Crozier stands in it on a chilly night, forehead resting against a stall door. He is breathing heavily. There is a hole in the door, cut by a craftsman’s hand, its edges smoothed and sanded with incongruous care. Francis has considered the hole at length, squatting at eye level to run an assessing fingertip along its circumference, noting the sharp stink of piss, the grime crusting the wood, which was of no great quality to begin with and might well blow down in a gale. Francis half hopes for a gale, standing inside the stall, about to do what he is going to do.

Down by the dockyards there is a hole in the door of a public privy you can put your cock through. Francis has lately been unable to get it out of his head, not since he stood beside two midshipmen at the bar in a pub far too close to Whitehall, the men half blind with drink, their tongues loose. Francis is at loose ends himself nowadays, and that day was no different; he had grappled with Sir John over various logistical points concerning the ships’ accessory steam engines, and though Fitzjames had been mercifully absent from the proceedings Francis had been treated to another long and hectoring letter from him about magnetics, the contents of which might have been circumscribed in a brief note were Fitzjames at all capable of brevity. Reading the letter was nearly as harrowing as seeing the man in person, and so when all was said and done Francis felt he deserved a drink or three to unsnarl his nerves before he set off home.

When he heard the topic of the midshipmen’s conversation Francis’s first impulse was to upbraid them. He was embarrassed for them, for his station, for the entire institution of the Navy. He nearly started in, but for that he would have had to interrupt. Instead, for some reason he did not fully understand, he had motioned for another round. Whiskey in hand, he had adjusted his cravat and thanked a God who had surely forsaken all three of them that the midshipmen did not part until one had told the other the approximate address. 

He did not truly think he would go through with it. But then days had passed, and he could not cease turning the idea over in his mind. He told himself he would go down to see _Terror_ , perhaps continue to shore up her good will. He is superstitious as any sailor, and the ship has been his confessor before but not as captain. Now she will be his entirely. He ought to go and pat her wide flank, scratch her between the ears. She slumbers in dock and Francis flits about her like her steward. She does not appear to notice him, but he hopes she knows he is there.

Perhaps, Francis thinks as he fumbles with his flies, it will be one of the sailors from the pub who comes into the toilet tonight. Or perhaps there is more than one such pit of iniquity, perhaps scores of them, and they will go there instead. The thought of all these needful holes rouses Francis. His cock fills in his smallclothes. He is such a yearning creature and his wants twist into strange shapes. He wants quite fervently to put his face between Sophia Cracroft’s legs, and yet he wants also to thrust blindly through this hole in a wall.

He kneels again as he frees himself, his cock fairly steaming in the cool and damp. He sets his eye to the hole as to a spyglass. He is accustomed to such a circular view of the world but he has never looked on such a sight as this dingy interior, with its ammoniac stench and its persistent drip. Water has condensed on the walls and the whole squalid compartment seems alive, fetid, as though Francis is standing in a cave. He fists himself idly, coming quickly to full hardness under his own familiar touch. All the open air around him makes his arse clench and the small hairs stand at attention on the nape of his neck. He can hear shouts from the distant street, though he ducked down an alley to come here and he is far from any crowds or carriages. The only step he is likely to hear is that of whomever comes here for him.

He strains his ears. The anticipation sends blood racing ever southward. He waits so long that when at last he hears footsteps he is certain he is imagining them. Immediately he wants to go, to blunder out of the privy claiming to be lost, but instead some dark determination compels his next action, and when he sees the shadow cross the threshold he scrambles to his feet. He spits in his hand and slicks his cock with it, ridiculously, as though this will ease his way through wood. He mumbles a curse as he guides himself to the hole. And then he presses his belly, his chest flush to the locked door and waits.

Francis feels the air change when the other man comes into the room. There is a disruptive weight to it, like the dip of a mattress when another slips into bed beside you. He thinks briefly of four postered canopies, fine drapes, parting legs and a wet flash of pink—but no, Francis, you will not think of her here—

His heart, his whole world, beats in his cock. He thinks of how it must look, standing alone. Pink too, surely, and perhaps forlorn. He does not think it proud. He has never been cocksure in any sense of the word. There is a grind and scrape of boots on the floor. Closer, closer he comes. Francis feels as though he might shout. What if he shouts? What if the man does not want to suck him? His cock is vulnerable, tender. What if the man should harm him? What if the man is not a man but an animal that would set to and snap his cock clean off? He half expects to flag but fear only quickens his heart, and the first touch of fingers on his heated flesh is so gentle that Francis sobs against the wood.

“Hallo,” says the man. “What’s this, then?” His voice is pitched as though he is speaking to a dog, or to a child.

 _Christ,_ thinks Francis. _Am I supposed to answer?_

He recalls the sailors in the pub: no pleasantries, the one had said. No speaking at all. And no coin changing hands. And they’d laughed at that, clapped one another on the back. Francis had felt a pang of misplaced nostalgia. As a middie he’d have been alone on a night like that, not counting his coin for doxies with a mate. He is alone as a captain too, and probably better for it. But he is not alone now. And his company has either not heard the admonition not to speak, or he is ignoring it.

The man gives an appreciative hum. He has taken Francis carefully in hand. He is gloveless, and his hands bear the ghosts of calluses. Working hands, thinks Francis, but perhaps not so lately busy. 

“Look at you,” the man says. “Lovely. You’ve a fine breadth and no mistake.” 

His voice is but a low murmur. Francis finds it somehow familiar, but perhaps it is only that there is a queer comfort here he had not anticipated: the man finds him pleasing. Somehow Francis had not expected anyone to consider him at all during these proceedings, let alone to find him pleasing.

The man’s voice drifts up from the hole between Francis’s legs. He has gone right to his knees on the filthy floor. He speaks freely and cares not for who might hear him. There is a rustle of fabric, the soft pop of buttons, and the man gives a barely perceptible sigh. Of relief, of pleasure—Francis knows both of these. They are both the sounds of a mantle set aside.

“Oh, God,” the man whispers.

There is a door between them but Francis can feel his eyes. His mouth is close enough to the head of Francis’s cock that Francis can feel his words as they are spoken. Reverent caresses. Something silky—a lock of hair?—tickles his skin and then is brushed away. And then, without warning, all is heat, all is a slick-walled grotto consuming Francis pelvis first.

He does shout then. He sets his lips and teeth against the wood and screams. Abbreviated, certainly, and deflated, for he lacks the breath in his lungs to make the sound carry, but he screams, and the man chokes air out his nose, a practiced laugh that does not break his rhythm. His devilish mouth sucks at Francis like a boiled sweet. Wait, wait, Francis wants to say, wants to warn the man of something, but what it is flees his mind before he can pin it to the door, pass it like a scribbled note through the hole to tell the man there must be some mistake, that men like Francis do not do these things, and not for any misbegotten sense of propriety. It is only that things like this feel too purely good to be deserved.

Francis has remained stock-still but as he begins to give himself over to the motion of the scene he finds that his hips have begun to stutter. The man on the other side of the door is moving too, from the play of heat and cool on Francis’s length, so rapidly alternating that he can no longer discern them. There is no talking, only vague wet sounds and breathing. Francis imagines the man’s stooping form, hunched over his protruding cock like a penitent. How must it be to kneel this way before a filthy hole in the wall, to make oneself a hole in kind? What sort of man would so debase himself?

 _The sort who would give you this,_ says a susurrus voice in his head.

Francis imagines other holes, other dark and dripping vestibules. Where might be the limits of his partner’s generosity? Francis is as yet only partially a sodomite, but he wonders what might happen if this man had met his searching cock with some other receptacle. Would it be as endlessly yielding as the mouth, the throat he plunders? He groans to think of it.

But oh, he must be grateful for what he has been given. This beautiful mouth. This tongue that plays along his slit and coaxes forth his spend, which Francis can feel gathering at his root already. These teeth that drag at his most delicate flesh. Francis hisses and his partner laughs, kisses the sting from the head of his cock with all the fullness of his lips. He remains there for long minutes kissing and tonguing it as one might a lover’s mouth, until Francis is cursing and scrabbling at the partition between them.

Francis is desperate to touch him. He drops his hand to the hole and insinuates two fingers through it alongside his straining cock. He thrills to feel the man’s cheek just there, smooth and beardless. He tries and fails to form an image from the patch of peach-flesh beneath his fingertips. How does he look? How old is he? His voice was low enough, and though his scope is limited Francis can perceive no youthful naivety in the man’s overall carriage. The man is well practiced at this, by desire or by necessity. The fact that no coin will pass between them seems to imply the former, that he is on his knees for love of the act alone.

Francis quails at the thought of such brazenness. Something in his belly goes to liquid, and he pits all his weight against the stall door. His feet slip in the grit on the floor and he courts splinters moaning ceaselessly against the shaggy wood. He can feel his own cock bulging from within the other man’s cheek, shunting to and fro, to and fro. He drums his fingertips against it, tapping a frantic code. He is uncertain of his own message until he feels the twin brush of the other man’s fingers and knows he has sent signals up, hopeful flags hoisted upon a smaller mizzenmast, and they have been received. 

There is a knot within him and the other man has unpicked it. His fingers are wet with spit where they slide against Francis’s, where they coil and twist together. And surely it is understandable that Francis should imagine their bodies moving thus, Francis and this man who has knelt before him. He feels weak with gratitude. He curls his fist against the door and pounds it out. The man hums, fills the bowl of Francis’s hips with a warm vibrato, and it is this that hooks his climax in the end, curls his toes in his boots and sets sweet stars fizzing all along his spine.

He grunts a warning, but the heat of the man’s mouth remains inexorable. In fact, his lips are even more insistent, sealed to the base of Francis’s cock nearly at the place he disappears into the hole. Francis must be spending into the man’s very gullet, and he twitches again and again on the strength of this picture alone. He drops his hand away from the hole to paw weakly at the closed door, hands clasping and unclasping as the last of his climax spasms from him and is swallowed greedily by his companion. When he stills and begins to slacken the man continues to hold Francis in his mouth, no longer a cave of suction but a velvet cushion where his cock might now rest. Francis imagines remaining here all night, standing until his knees give out. If he does not move perhaps the man will not either. But then his body betrays him, his cock so limp it spills back into the hole from whence it was thrust, retreating like a tentacle.

“Oh,” sighs Francis, bereft. From the other side of the door he hears the rustle of fabric, hears the man heave his own heavy breath.

Francis tucks himself away and wonders what is supposed to happen. There had been, momentarily, a script, but he has reached its end. He supposes he waits for the other man to leave. He could stay here in silence and he is sure that that would happen. No words, no pleasantries. No coin—but what if the man does ask, after all? Francis will pay him. It will have been well earned. He half convinces himself that the man will ask, and finds the thought oddly comforting, like the man’s tacit approval of his cock. Another script—Francis does not make a habit of paying for company but he understands well enough how it is supposed to work. He wants only to see the man, to say something to him before he goes.

Oh, he has utterly failed at this. Was not facelessness the very purpose? And yet he feels there has been some connexion, and that he will die if he does not look upon his partner. A scuffling comes from behind the door. His heart leaps: he has spent too long in rumination, and now the man is leaving. Francis panics, forgetting how to work the door latch, and succeeds only in jostling it wildly.

“Wait!” he cries. His hands work upon the latch at last, and the door swings wide. He does not know what vision awaits him outside. He has no expectation, but the sight that greets him exceeds even the widest and furthest-ranging of any he might have had. Francis reels, flung immediately to a bourn from which he cannot ever fathom returning.

James Fitzjames sits in a pile on the stained floor of the privy, wiping the dregs of Francis’s issue from his lips with a monogrammed handkerchief. He is as disheveled as Francis has ever seen him, hair limp, face sallow in the strange light, yet he remains infuriatingly handsome. He is in civil clothing. A hat and a pair of gloves have been cast onto the floor. He is fully dressed save his still open flies, and would the sight not strike Francis blind he imagines he could look upon Fitzjames’s own spent cock there, for it has left a mess upon Fitzjames’s thigh and the floor beside him.

Fitzjames gapes at him, bare shock on his face. He looks precisely as Francis feels: rattled to the very core, and for a time they simply look at one another, sucking lungfuls of the same thick air, blood still singing with what they’ve done. Fitzjames’s mouth is faintly swollen, and Francis still feels his cheek beneath his fingers. An image comes into his mind, seen as though from outside himself: he might step closer to Fitzjames, might reach out again, might touch that mouth. He goes so far as a step forward, and then—

Then Fitzjames laughs. A wonderful, bubbling sound. A duplicitous sound, too, for how nearly it convinces Francis to be cheerful. Fitzjames’s face breaks into a broad grin. He seems…joyous, which perplexes Francis, as easy as part of Francis yearns to feel. But that smile limns too close to memory. It sends another picture ripping into his taxed brain. Fitzjames looks like this at table, where he so loves holding court. What better story, thinks Francis in dawning horror, than the night he sucked his captain’s cock for sport?

All warmth and goodwill flees Francis, replaced an instant later with incandescent rage. Fitzjames’s expression remains guileless, but Francis will not be fooled. Fitzjames opens his mouth to speak, but Francis does not let him. “What is the meaning of this?” he spits.

Fitzjames freezes. He lets his smile die, and then he resumes neatening himself with the air of a man at the gallows. He coughs. “I should think the meaning would be quite clear, Francis.” There is a faint tremor in his words, but Francis does not mark it, distracted by how rough he sounds. If Fitzjames’s speaking voice is plummy then this is fruit darkly bruised, and Francis’s face flares to know the cause.

“You followed me here,” says Francis. “You meant to—to prey on me. Admit it!”

Fitzjames laughs again. No warm offering now, but a poisoned dart. “Do you think my prospects so poor? I suppose they might seem it, mightn’t they, for here I sit. But I am not in the habit of taking what is not enthusiastically offered.” At this, he looks pointedly at the hole in the door.

“To entrap me, then.”

“I just said, I did not follow you. At worst I watched from a great distance and saw a man enter who did not leave. I was too far to see your face, I swear it. If I had, I should never—”

“Oh, you should never?”

Fitzjames’s eyes roll heavenward. “Good Christ, man. Look how you protest when I have! You cannot damn me for the one and beg for the other in the same breath. Given the choice, think you I wouldn’t have spared both of us the trouble?”

“I begged for nothing,” Francis says.

And this at least lands home, for Fitzjames screws up his mouth and looks at the floor. He has lolled backwards onto his hands, legs bent before him, pale dust clinging to the knees of his dark trousers. A man who goes to his knees for love of it.

Francis grunts. There is no mirror in this hellish place, so he tries to scrape himself to rights by touch alone, Fitzjames watching every move.“I would offer you this, but it’s rather soiled,” he says airily, waving his handkerchief as though they have not violated approximately seventeen articles between them.

“Go to hell,” says Francis.

“I’ll not forsake the expedition, you know. A gentleman might offer, but it seems none are here tonight.” 

Francis could have him over the coals for insubordination for all of this, and both of them know it, but under the circumstances it would be akin to quibbling over this or that circle of Hell. 

“Would you please get off the floor? I cannot speak with you seriously while you lounge about that way.”

Fitzjames glares at him. He sits up and wipes his hands on his ruined trousers, then he extends one to Francis and waits to be assisted. Francis stares too long at Fitzjames’s fingers, and when he reaches for the hand at last and helps Fitzjames to his feet, he knows the lag has given him away. With Fitzjames upright they stand very close together, Fitzjames apparently determined to make some sort of statement by thrusting his presence into Francis’s personal space. He looks less vitriolic, but still prideful, still chagrined. He would have looked proud before the closed door too, thinks Francis. There would have been dignity in the way he bowed his head, in the way he set to breaking Francis apart. Francis is angry, the evening a farce, but there is yet some honesty to the act he can respect.

“You ought to go,” Fitzjames says. 

“And you?” Francis wishes both to never set eyes on Fitzjames again and to keep him in sight forever, that he might be assured of his keeping mum. 

“I will straighten up and follow.” 

“Follow?” 

Fitzjames grimaces and rakes a hand back through his hair. “Not follow! Proceed home, by a route of my own choosing. Divergent from yours. God, Crozier, say you are not always so plodding.” 

I am not always recovering from having my cock sucked to a fare-thee-well by the likes of James bloody Fitzjames, thinks Francis. “Where are your lodgings?” he asks instead.

“In London? Far from you, by my understanding. But I shall flee the city altogether if it pleases the captain.” 

“Peace, peace,” grumbles Francis. “No call for that, is there.” 

“Is there?” 

Francis groans. “No,” he says. 

A fraught silence descends. Fitzjames makes no move from Francis’s side, and Francis remains steadfast himself out of obstinance or sheer blank-mindedness. Would he cast Fitzjames from London, from the expedition entire? Probably, had he the choice, but it is regrettably not Francis’s to make. However it might pain him to admit it, though, he cannot reconcile the blousy, blustering Commander Fitzjames with the man who stands before him. He is not diminished, not exactly. Rather he is tempered, cooling from the application of some great heat. Perhaps Francis has absorbed it in his turn, though if he has it is leaving him now. 

Fitzjames shuffles his feet. “You made no reply to my letter,” he says softly.

“You sent it only days ago.”

“Did I? It seems longer than that.” His tongue worries at the carmine seam of his lips. He steps back, but only just, and only to consider Francis with a look of deep consternation. As Francis watches, breathless, he raises his hand. At once Francis is a child again, expecting to be slapped. But Fitzjames only reaches for him and rights a mislaid strand of hair, combing it back into place with his fingers.

Fitzjames does not withdraw his hand directly. He fusses with Francis’s collar, which he neatens. With his cravat, which he loosens and reties. When Francis next spies his reflection, he will see an Irish knot. He thinks of the ship, how he thought to conjure luck by spit-shine.

“I will see to it,” says Francis.

“Hmm?”

“Your letter. I will see to it first thing.”

“You should go out first,” Fitzjames says in reply. He has put his hands in his pockets. “Go back along the canals, and do not wait about for me.”

 _Hardly,_ Francis could say, but he doesn’t. That quiet awe has come again between them. Here is a lead that will shortly close, though neither knows it yet. It will not reopen for a long time. Francis steps back and goes out into the night. He assumes that Fitzjames follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "For each ecstatic instant" by Emily Dickinson, which is absolutely about accidentally getting the blow job of your life from your professional nemesis.


End file.
